Critic Reviews

I’ve watched four episodes, and every one of them is hugely entertaining and frequently surprising.

“Love” seems like a strong word, but there’s a lot to enjoy here. Norm Macdonald Has a Show is a very meticulous mess, built with the opposite of frills.

For fans of Macdonald’s comedy, this will feel right in his wheelhouse. But it’s hard to get away from the sense that Macdonald doesn’t particularly care, and that he is its only intended audience.

Fonda’s guest appearance is head-and-shoulders the best of the four I’ve seen. In fact, Episode 1, with David Spade featured, is so excruciatingly bad that you’re better off skipping it entirely. ... If you’re a Norm Macdonald fanatic, and there likely aren’t very many of those, it’s best to watch this show while you still can.

It’s incredibly frustrating to watch a comic once defined by his sharp commentary wander so aimlessly through this show just because he can. Even if the question of how Macdonald got this show is easily answered, the question of why anyone outside he and his diehards fans should bother with it never is.

Norm Macdonald Has a Show, his new Netflix series, is pretty terrible. It's labor-intensive to get through. In the moments when it's disastrously bad, you wonder if that's the joke; given that Macdonald is notoriously adherent to anti-jokes and anti-stories as a conceit, it's at least a possibility. But no. ... Norm Macdonald Has a Show is a painful thing to watch.